Thanks to a summer intern who is living with us in Peru, we pushed the first upgrade to ROA today in over 3 years. You can now edit prayer requests by double-clicking on an item when you’re in the Home section.

We have rewritten the app to latest versions of underlying libraries and upgraded to redundant databases (Google App Engine HRD). Please comment if you notice any negative (or positive) changes. We now have an excellent foundation in place to begin rapidly adding new features, and I’m starting to work on the Android app.

ROA’s summer intern is working hard to roll out many new features and enhancements. The first to see daylight is the new HTML email option. If you’re tired of plain text, sign in and go to Settings, where you can now choose HTML or text email. You can also uncheck the “Send daily emails” box to stop receiving daily emails altogether.

Next we’re working on the long-requested edit feature, and, coming soon… mobile apps!

I just discovered that none of the daily emails went out this morning due to a bug I introduced yesterday afternoon while trying to optimize the mail sender. Sorry about that. I’ve fixed it and delivery should resume tomorrow.

ROAblog and the ROA main site are hosted at two different places: WordPress.com and Google AppEngine. But using a little CSS wizardy, I’ve been able to make them look identical. The WordPress.com site does not allow custom themes, so I had to get a little creative to get the links and nav bar on the WordPress page. I used text widgets in the sidebar and “moved” them into place with CSS. The footer was trickier, as the same technique could not move it out of the sidebar, but those of you who subscribe to this blog via email have already discovered the secret: I created a “sticky” post tagged with “footer” and used CSS to move it to the bottom of the page.

At any rate, you can now enjoy a seamless experience between the site, the app (which is live, by the way!), and the blog.